Miles Davis "GET UP WITH IT" Poll

My favourite Miles.

― Dysphagia Nutrition Solutions (stevie), Sunday, January 22, 2017 2:51 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Mine too. Today it is, anyway.

"Calypso Frelimo," goddamn

what's up with the version of "Honky Tonk" on here, is it an edit of one of the longer ones from the complete Jack Johnson or Cellar Door sets?

i think it's an edit from the jack johnson sessions? definitely a studio recording from 1970.

It's definitely from the Jack Johnson sessions

Finally got around to checking this album out for the first time last weekend, on a long overnight train trip, pretty ideal listening conditions

“Honky Tonk” is from the Jack Johnson sessions but the open with the wah-wah clavinet first appeared as one of Teo’s brutal edits on Live-Evil. It’s on “Sivad,” the opening cut.

thank you! that was driving me crazy.

My favourite Miles.

― Dysphagia Nutrition Solutions (stevie), Sunday, January 22, 2017 2:51 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Mine too. Today it is, anyway.

"Calypso Frelimo," goddamn

― Paul Ponzi, Wednesday, November 13, 2019 3:37 PM (two months ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^

I know lots of Miles, but wasn't that familiar with this album. I just bought an original LP and I love it. It's so funky and rhythmic yet spacey as can be.

I regret passing on a clean copy of this the other month

Loved "Maiysha" for years, but always wrongly assumed it was John MacLaughlin playing on it. Turns out there are three (THREE) people playing electric guitar on that track.

also three guitars on "He Loved Him Madly" and "Mtume" iirc

Dipping into some Miles albums for the day... I have to say this may be my favourite of his. Each track its own weird planet of sound

when I listen to miles of this era the music conjures up this sense of incredible movement, speed, and directional changes of course that it just sets my imagination flying. When I see footage of these guys playing, it blows me away that there are just five guys standing on a stage. never fails to astound

Miles leans on the keyboard in "Rated X", right? I have a hard time with that one, otherwise yeah this goes well with "Big Fun". "He Loved Him Madly" pairs perfectly with "In A Silent Way".

Of his 70s albums, this one has always been a little problematic for me. For one, I first heard it on vinyl and a few of the sides are so long the sound wasn’t great (HLHM and CF). Secondly, Red China Blues is just this weird oddity in his catalogue. Brass band and harmonica? Third, the really long tracks are, well, really long and as great as He Loved Him Madly is I’d argue it’s maybe a little overlong (Calypso Frelimo is def. overlong). Fourth, the thing is also a massive odds and sods collection – Honky Tonk is from 1970 and sounds like it’s even older than that compared to the more contemporaneous stuff like Mayisha. Lastly, while I enjoy tracks like Mtume and Billy Preston fine, they are sort of interchangeable in my mind.

The one complete success here for which I have no reservations is Rated X – and it’s one of the most glorious things he ever did for a gazillion reasons. So it can’t help but color the record in a boldness and clarity of purpose that elevates its reputation a bit beyond the material. Cover doesn’t hurt either.

Worth noting that whatever version of this they put on Spotify has multiple moments (I noticed in "He Loved Him Madly" and "Calypso Frelimo") where the sound crinkles to nothing in one channel as if we're listening to a needle drop. In general, the sound is shit and not in a "Teo mixed it that way, man!" way. My disc is some German pressing from the 90s before these were redone, no idea what the remasters sound like.

Does anyone have this Session of "He Loved Him Madly" bootleg?

https://www.kind-of-blue.de/seiten/disco/sowhat_sw149.htm

I dimly recall finding it on YouTube a few years ago, but I'm not 100% sure that actually happened. At any rate, it's not there now and slsk and a certain torrent tracker are coming up dry currently.

It looks like the full "He Loved Him Madly" session is about 20 minutes longer than the album version. It's probably nothing revelatory, but I've been deep into this record lately and I'll take all the extras I can get...

I did come across it on Soulseek once and downloaded it. It was indeed not too revelatory, and I had to delete it due to storage constraints.

Yeah I suspected as much. Speaking of "He Loved Him Madly", one of the most surprising things I learned from reading Paul Tingen's Miles Beyond was that Pete Cosey doesn't play on that track; it's just Reggie Lucas and Dominique Gaumont on guitar, with the latter playing lead. The story goes that Cosey arrived at the studio from the airport right as the session began, and rather than tune up and join in he basically decided to just sit there and send good vibes to the band. A very advanced technique that achieved magical results

This and SAW II are pretty much my two favorite albums to do work to.

The Paul Tingen book had a breakdown of the final version of "He Loved Him Madly", and as I recall it was pieced together out of a lot of fragments, there wasn't one huge take that got pared down.
If you want more, have you listened to the Bill Laswell remix? Panthalassa was the CD in my car when it got stolen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhtWMQex-1A

Oh yeah, I listened to Panthalassa years ago and remember digging it but haven't revisited since then. I always forget it exists whenever I go through an electric Miles phase. Just fired that up and it's sounding real nice, thanks. The drums are mixed/EQ'd in a way that scans as more "modern" than the original. It takes away some of the mystique but it's cool to hear it from a different perspective.

In the liner notes, Laswell says Teo Macero "didn't know how to record drums" or some nonsense, but it is interesting to hear the piece mixed this way.

Now listening to the Panthalassa "Rated X" and I think the modern drum mixing is way less successful there. The original still sounds totally alien, a wild monolith of noise with the shrieking organ threatening to consume the whole track. The Laswell mix sounds good (it's hard to fuck up pure gold source material) but way less compelling than the original

An incredible bootleg from 1974 went up on The Heat Warps today - apparently it was recorded from the stage by Dave Liebman, and/but it honestly sounds better than some of the stuff Columbia actually released (looking in your direction, Dark Magus...). This was the three-guitar version of the band with Pete Cosey, Reggie Lucas, and Dominique Gaumont, and it's a must-hear, and easily digestible since it's only 40 minutes long.

https://theheatwarps.com/2022/02/28/5-25-1974-rio-de-janeiro/

Amazing, thanks! This sounds three-dimensional through headphones. Henderson is enormous. I have a bootleg of one of the Sao Paulo shows from the same tour, but this sounds so much better. "2 x Nakamichi 1700 mics - Sony deck"

That Rio set is insane! And the sound quality is great; absolutely in your face. Holy shit. Thank you!

The guy who runs The Heat Warps is really doing God's work. I've spent most of today marathoning mid-73 shows, and it's endlessly fascinating to hear these guys explore and re-invent the same half-dozen vamps/themes at every show.
Someone made a "megamix" a few years ago where they stitched together every "Dark Star" the Grateful Dead played in 1972 (it's like 10 hours long). I'm thinking of doing the same thing but with every version of "Ife" from 1973 (and maybe 74?).

Anyway the "Ife" that opens this 7/20/73 Antibes set is BEYOND:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZtsX9wGGRI

I think I have posted it on another Miles thread but I got told a story about Miles Davis playing a fundraiser for Birch Bayh in 1974 in Indianapolis by an old jazz record head that used to own a shop on 52nd street in Indy. He saw this show and said the blue haired crowd was kinda expecting 'My Funny Valentine' Miles and instead they got the African UFO landing. I bet it was a hoot and would love to have been a fly on the wall at that scene.

https://i.imgur.com/olxoYMH.png

Greatest album of all time

I have listened to this a lot, and I won't say it's not classic, but I can't say that Miles did his due diligence in making sure that every song needed to be exactly as long as it is.
I mean there are a number of longeurs here, its only contemporary rival may be X by Klaus Schulze, which is actually 7 minutes shorter.

Sorry, "longueurs".

"He Loved Him Madly" needs to be exactly as long as it is imo

What do you think of the 13-minute version I posted above?

I'd call "Billy Preston" and "Mtume" the biggest offenders.

"Mtume" is the only one that goes on too long for me. I just find the main vamp for that one kind of ugly and unpleasant. The B section is better but 15 minutes of back-and-forth between those two sections is exhausting. But He Loved Him Madly, Maiysha, Calypso Frelimo, Billy Preston--all exactly as long as they need to be.

"He Loved Him Madly" isn't long enough.

questionable cover art for the reissue
https://i.imgur.com/olxoYMH.png

"He Loved Him Madly" needs to be exactly as long as it is imo

That shorter version is an interesting experiment, but the full-length version needs its duration to dramatize the process of accepting grief.

This album has a song called “billy Preston?” How have I never heard this

You need to get up with it, it'll change your life

This used to be one of those masterpieces that was equally famous for being hard to find.

How iffy was the vinyl? Three sides weighing in at over 30 minutes a shot is nuts.

xp Yeah I got a Japanese import CD of it from the Virgin Megastore in Chicago in 1999 or 2000, which was incredibly exciting to find. It was for my birthday when I was 13 or 14, and my dad was kind of miffed to be spending $40 on a CD lol. There was an air of mystery surrounding it at the time, and because it was only available as an import you couldn't even stream samples of it on Amazon/CDNow.

The OG Columbia vinyl actually sounds great to my ears

Also on the vinyl something about the surface noise lends an extra layer of gravitas to "He Loved Him Madly"

xp to self I just remembered that when Columbia finally reissued it on CD a year or two after I got the Japanese import, I bought the US CD and gave the import to a fellow music nerd friend. Which I kind of regret now because the Japanese Mastersound CDs are supposedly mastered way better than the Columbia/Legacy CDs. But i've never been an audiophile, so I guess it's nbd

If it's any consolation, I have both and the difference in sound to my ears is negligible. But I'm not an audiophile, either

The only MasterSound CDs you absolutely have to have are the circa-2000 editions of Agharta and Pangaea, and that's because a) the mix is radically different — clearer and more spacious, you can hear everything everyone's doing — and there's about 10 extra minutes of music on Agharta and about 5 extra minutes on Pangaea.

Oh man the Agharta and Pangaea Master Sound CDs are a rabbit hole of their own. I have the 1996 vinyl replica Master Sound CDs of both, and they sound clear and fantastic, with the extra few minutes of music you mentioned (mostly ambient noise jamming):
https://www.discogs.com/release/2309989-Miles-Davis-Pangaea

Then in 2006 there was another series of Japanese vinyl-replica CD reissues with a completely different mix that is supposedly closer to the original Japanese vinyl mix (less dry than the 1996 Master Sound CDs with richer bass), and which do not include the extra few minutes of music:
https://www.discogs.com/release/3965702-Miles-Davis-Pangaea
I've downloaded this version, and I'm not sure I prefer it to the "dry" 1996 mix, but it's absolutely worth hearing for a more overtly psychedelic take on the material.

Then there was a series of Japanese "Blu-Spec" CD reissues in 2013, which are supposedly even more faithful to the original vinyl mix, though I haven't heard them.

There are whole threads on the Steve Hoffman forums devoted to the various reissues of these albums, and I've obviously spent too much time perusing them lol

Yeah, and it's still streamable, buyable

Following the May 1974 Rio show posted upthread, The Heat Warps posted three São Paulo shows from the same tour a few days ago:
https://theheatwarps.com/2022/03/09/sao-paulo/

I've had the May 28 show for a while and never really got into it due to the muffled sound quality. But the June 1 show is new to me and it's STUNNING, probably the best recording I've heard from the Dark Magus line-up. Amazing sound from Dave Liebman's onstage tape recorder--hot but not overloaded and everyone comes through clearly. I haven't even checked out the June 2 show yet because I keep replaying this one...